More Americans relocating for new jobs

Number of new hires who relocated jumped 35% in 2013

After living near Cleveland for 13 years, 41-year-old Troy Walker turned to his wife and said, “I can’t take another winter here.” She told him, “ if you get a job, we can move.” The couple had been vacationing in North Carolina for years, and Walker began looking for work near Raleigh in November; in December, the advertising professional had a job offer at an ad agency. “Everything just fell into place,” he says.

To be sure, there have been some adjustments. The area is different than Cleveland—Walker jokes that his local car wash has a sign that says “no washing pig smokers,” not something one sees in Ohio. And the family is understandably a little nervous about making a whole new set of friends and leaving family behind. Still, Walker says he’s glad they made the move. “It’s so easy to get caught in the inertia of life—that is where we were—I’m glad I just found a job and decided to go.”

Walker is part of a small but fast-growing trend: After years of staying put, the percentage of workers relocating for a new job in 2013 climbed 35% from a year prior, according to a survey released Thursday by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which looked at people who successfully obtained a new job last year. About 13% of people who got a new job in 2013 ended up moving house, up from 9.8% in 2012. “The labor market is slowly unlocking,” says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “This shows that people are more confident with the job market, willing to move to a new place and take their chances.”

What’s more, Challenger says this increased relocation rate is a sign that the economy is improving—specifically that the real estate market is picking up and more companies are hiring. Indeed, it’s easier to unload a home and move these days, as home prices climbed more than 10% in 2013, while foreclosure rates plummeted. “We’re going to make money on our home,” says 32-year-old Bonnie Taylor, who relocated from Las Vegas to Boston for a job in February. Plus, the unemployment rate fell from 7.9% in January to 6.7% in December. Also, 1.7% of workers voluntarily left their jobs in December, up from a mere 1.2% in 2009. “We are in a new place in the economy,” says Challenger.

People relocate for a number of reasons, but the most common is to accelerate their careers, says Chad M. Oakley, president and COO of Charles Aris, an executive search consulting company. “Unless you’re living in [a big city like] New York or San Francisco, it’s hard to achieve fast career progression without relocating from time to time,” he says.

But getting a job in another place isn’t always about the job itself: some people move for a relationship or to be near their families, says career coach Marc Dorio, author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Career Advancement.” Indeed, this is what Taylor—who had been living in Las Vegas for 14 years—did, after she had her son a year ago. “Once my son was born, my husband and I knew we wanted to move back east to be near both of our families,” she said. She started looking for jobs in October, not knowing what to expect, and says she quickly “got tons of calls and interviews from jobs in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.” She took a public relations job in Boston—which was “a big advancement” to her career—and moved her family in February. “We’ve already been to see my family twice and his once.”

Still others move for a lifestyle change: Lauren Holliday, 24, says she began looking for jobs in other places (she was then living in south Florida) about a year ago, because she “wanted to meet new people and do something amazing,” which she says “I maybe couldn’t have done if I stayed in Florida.” She applied for jobs all over the country, and just this month, moved to Boston to begin a marketing job at a startup. Already, she says, it’s been a life 180: She’s working with people with tons of prior experience at major companies and “meeting tons of cool people.” “I really wanted to make some big moves with my life—and I did.”

Not everyone is able to get move for a job. The kinds of jobs that tend to have the most relocation potential are technical jobs like engineers or researchers and senior-level jobs, says Challenger. “When a company wants to fill top jobs, they are often very open to looking throughout the country,” he says. Workers with little experience or in entry-level jobs may have a harder time getting a company to want to hire them when they live elsewhere, as companies may be able to more easily find candidates in the area. Plus, you may not get your pick of destinations: The openings tend to happen in larger cities, says Challenger. And, he says, cities with sub-5.0 unemployment like Austin, Washington, D.C. and Oklahoma City may have some of the most job openings, while smaller cities with high employment don’t have as many.

Still, while it’s hard to relocate, the prospects are better than they have been in years. But beyond evaluating the job and the new city’s lifestyle, employees have to consider the financial costs of making a move like this. For one, moving itself is pricey—the average cost of an interstate household move is about $5,630, and an intrastate move is $1,170 for a three-bedroom, single-family home, according to data from the American Moving & Storage Association; people with large homes and those in pricier cities may pay more. And that’s something employees must consider as only about one-third of companies say they would be willing to pay to relocate employees, according to a CareerBuilder survey. Employers say they are most likely to pay to relocate those in the engineering field (30% of employers), IT (23%), business development (21%), sales (21%), financial (16%), marketing (13%) and legal (11%).

What’s more, in addition to moving costs, employees must also consider things like the cost of living in the new locale (BestPlaces.net can help you figure this out), including housing, taxes and utility costs; car registration, a new license (contact the area DMV) and insurance for your car; other insurance costs; and transportation back to your old locale to see friends and family. Experts say that employees need to make sure their new salary will sufficiently cover all this.

Finally, employees must consider what would happen should the job not work out. Indeed, when 28-year-old sales professional Rachel Koller moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in July for a new job, she realized pretty quickly that the position wasn’t right for her. “I knew I needed something new,” she says—but she didn’t want to move back to Chicago. And that’s when she realized how glad she was that she was in a big city like L.A.: “I had so many options, and I interviewed with numerous companies,” she says. “That might not have been true somewhere else.” By September, she had found another job. Some people aren’t as lucky. “You may lose your network of people,” says Dorio. “You might be starting all over again if it doesn’t work out.”

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